Business – Jo Ind

Review: Starting Up & Scaling Up A Human-First Business

Jo Ind — Sat, 28 Jan 2023 21:11:21 +0000

It’s a sign of the success of a charity, community group or small business when it can outlive its founder members. An organisation has reached its coming-of-age, when the vision of the people who set it up is so embedded, it can thrive and survive without them.

Andrew Christophers has written Starting Up & Scaling Up A Human-First Business, as he steps back from Brand Genetics, the marketing consultancy he co-founded 25 years ago. He is essentially sharing his tips for success, rooted in the direct experience of growing a business from his kitchen table to one with a £6.1m turnover (December 2021).

Having read his book, I don’t think there’s any doubt that Brand Genetics will flourish without him in a hands-on role – and that’s the greatest compliment.

Andrew claims that Brand Genetics has achieved success through being a “human-first” organisation. His book unpacks what this means, using photographs, real-life stories and a nice big font with summaries of key take-outs at the end of each chapter. (It is a marketing consultancy after all.)

It’s distinctly lacking in pomposity and, with the slight exception of the section on Mutant Marketing, jargon-free. The book follows an A-to-Z structure, with insights appearing in alphabetical, rather logical, order. It essentially makes the book a selection of anecdotes, like pearls on a necklace. To me, this is a human-first, approach – presenting the nuggets as insights from a well-lived life rather than a thesis. Andrew says that Michael, one of his members of staff, used to joke about some of Brand Genetics work, saying: “that’s all very well in practice, but what’s the theory?” Scrap the theory – that’s what I say.

This is a book about scaling up a start-up, but it resonated with my experience of working in charities, medium-sized businesses, and global corporations too. What he says about delegation and trusting younger people to do the work will be appreciated by micro-managed employees in organisations of every size.

I took strength from his JFDI section which was about the importance of making decisions. “I once read that the best managers don’t make better decisions, they just make more decisions,” he says. Yes! Absolutely! I hereby take “Just F***ing Do It” as my modus operandi.

The most surprising tip came from his Never Stop section. I thought it a universal rule of business that you never have someone in the job at the time you need them. By the time you have identified the need, made the business case, signed off the job description, advertised the post, interviewed and waited for the new employee to hand in their notice, you are so busy doing the work yourself that you don’t have time to induct the new employee into the role. Was it not ever thus? (Or is that just the way it works in the circles where I hang out?)

Brand Genetics has an interesting take on this. They try to hire good people BEFORE they need them, knowing they will need them one day. There’s something I never thought of before… “Never Stop selling, and never stop recruiting either,” says Andrew.

The most touching anecdote came in Y is for You, which was about being your true self at work. From the style of his book, it’s easy to imagine that Andrew is a bit of an operator in business. He admits that he was good at putting on a suit and playing the game. Who’s to say that his business wasn’t just like all the others – where the guys at the top deliver a nice patter about employee-care but are no different from anyone else in reality?

I found myself believing that Brand Genetics really was a human-first business when Andrew admits that putting on a suit and playing the game came at a cost of being true to himself. He says he didn’t want that. And he wanted everyone at Brand Genetics to be their true selves, warts and all. So one of his employees would come to work in shorts and bring his dog with him too – and they loved him for it.

For me, that heart-warming anecdote brought a distinct layer of authenticity to this beautifully presented and easily digestible book. I believe Brand Genetics really is a human-first business – and as such businesses of all sizes need to sit up and listen.

(I don’t suppose you’ve got a job going, have you?)

(Starting Up & Scaling Up A Human-First Business by Andrew Christophers is published by Troubador and costs £12.99)

Place

Jo Ind — Sun, 21 Jun 2020 11:32:11 +0000

Written in lockdown from the spring equinox (79 deaths) to the summer solstice (128 deaths)

Lime trees in Highbury Park, Birmingham, like a nave in nature’s cathedral.

HOME AS PLACE

The summer house in our garden has become my writing place. At one time, I used to write in the study, our converted loft, but not anymore. The coronavirus lockdown means school is no longer a place but a series of emails. Consequently, the loft has been taken over. It has become the classroom and music room (and place for the Xbox, natch) while I have moved to the wooden shed at the bottom of the garden.

As I sit in my summer house, the blackbirds and wood pigeons are singing. I can hear children playing from somewhere in the mid-distance – between number 56 and 68, I would guess. Sometimes I hear a violin from number 72. Weeks ago, there would have been ambulance sirens, but those come less often now. I look back at our terraced house, through the fruit trees, over my son’s goal post and the homes of our neighbours snuggled down the street.

This is my place. And it has changed during lockdown. Our road now has a WhatsApp group which means I know food has been collected from our doorsteps and taken to the foodbank. Shopping has been dropped off at the homes of the sick. Plants have been shared and libraries of books have been left on the little brick walls outside our houses. Now, when I look down our street, I don’t just see a row of terraced houses, I see kindness.

This is my place and I notice that, in many ways, my place has shrunk. I used to think of Kings Heath, with it rows of terraced houses and useful shops, as the outer edge of the neighbouring suburb of Moseley, where my son went to school and whose U15s cricket team I manage. There was never a day when I didn’t go into Moseley and so I felt as though I lived in Moseley/Kings Heath. But those days seem a long time ago and Moseley seems like somewhere else. My place is smaller now.

Even the High Street seems some distance away. I’m sure Asda, Smith’s and Wilko are still there, but I haven’t walked eastward and seen them for weeks. Each day in lockdown, I have walked west. I have taken my sadness, my peace, my worry or my joy to the trees; to Kings Heath Park with the oaks and poplars and silver birch. And I have walked down the lane, scented with cow parsley, to the neighboring park of Highbury. I have seen it change from the pink of April to the blue of May and the yellow of June. I have found an avenue lined with lime trees, like a nave in nature’s cathedral. Each day I have walked down that aisle saying Mary Oliver’s words “I am a bride married to amazement” in renewed wonder at the beauty just yards from my door.

So now, as I sit in my summer house, I no longer imagine my home as a place near the number 50 bus stop. My home is in a village on the edge of a meadow. It’s down from the wood, across the way from the pond where ducklings hatch and marsh irises bloom.

Church as place

Church used to be a place. We have all known since Sunday school that the church is the people, not the building. But the fact that the people only ever met in a building meant the whenever we talked about “going to church” we meant going to that place with a steeple or a bell. Not anymore. Our building opens once a week on a Thursday for the food bank. Otherwise, those that can – which I’m painfully aware isn’t everyone – meet through Zoom.

To my surprise, it works. In amongst the glitches and freezes and struggles with mute, we manage to pray. We can’t sing together. Even saying the grace together is tricky. Yet somehow that doesn’t detract from the simple experience of being a people together in prayer.

In many ways being released of “place” has made thing easier. For the past four years or so, we haven’t had a regular vicar, so we have exhausted ourselves either finding a stand-in priest (so we can have communion) or devising a service ourselves as the next best thing. Without a place, we can’t meet for communion anyway – so that sorts out the need for a priest at a stroke.

It sorts out another problem too. We are actually two churches that came together because the church can no longer afford to have a priest in every parish. The two congregations have tried to hold joint services but in practice, because the services have been in either one building or the other, one congregation has always been host and the other guest. By removing “place” we have been able to meet for the first time on equal terms.

All of which makes me wonder if we’d be better off without a building. Can we be a people without a place?

There are no easy answers to that one. The community has been formed through place – through the parishes and the buildings that stand proudly in each one. At the start of lockdown, I drove down to our church building in Balsall Heath with a boot load of food for the foodbank. There was Ivor tending the garden, Ann at the door with her apron on and Theo, my Godson, loading a trolley with food. How I had missed them! I missed them because they are amongst those who can’t join us on Zoom. I missed those ways of being together that are about tea and welcome rather than words. I missed the place because that’s where we feed the hungry, say farewell to the souls of the departed and share the seasons of our lives through song.

If we want to do those things – which we do – then having a place helps. But in the effort to maintain a place, with the history of expectation that goes with it, we lose our simplicity. Instead of serving us, our buildings become heavy weights of policy, finance and quotes for leaking roofs. I have no idea when we will return to our place or how I will feel when that happens, but I guess it won’t be like sinking back into a comfy chair. The affection for the organ, the sanctuary and bread and wine upon the altar, will be underpinned by a disturbing question. In holding onto our place, have we lost something more precious along the way?

Work as place

For the past 18 months, I have felt ambivalent about my place of work – London. I work for ScreenSkills, an organisation with goals dear to my heart, not least because it opens up careers in the screen industries to those who have been excluded in the past.

Even so, on my train rides down to London, I would look back with nostalgia at my home city of Birmingham. I would remember the days when I worked in the West Midlands as a journalist, combing through the region and crafting its stories. I would look wistfully on the days when I was an ambassador for Birmingham’s beautiful library, worked alongside the Grand Union Canal, or listened to the waves of protestors from an office in Victoria Square. I mourned the sense of belonging I had enjoyed through working in the heart of Birmingham for more than two decades.

For the past three months, I have imagined the city centre as still. I have assumed that stillness was either eerie or tranquil, depending on your point of view. I have imagined a thick quiet in the air where once there was the clacking of heels crisscrossing Pigeon Park and dodgem-style bumps of shoppers in the Bull Ring. (Like, I said, I’m guessing). In a way, there’s nothing for me to mourn anymore, because that hubbub of activity to which I once belonged, is no longer there. ScreenSkills, too, is of no fixed abode. We have a conceptual abode – a memory, an address that’s listed on Google and with the Charity Commission. But the daily reality is that we’re a community of people united by cloud, through purpose, not place.

In many ways, I like work better. We have an all-staff meeting each Friday, over Zoom, where we play games and hang out in breakout rooms. I no longer feel like a person commuting in from the regions but an equal member of the team. We ask the question: “Do we even need a place?” (No answers yet.) And while we’re asking that, I know that Birmingham-based businesses are asking the same.

So what happens when work is about purpose not place? What happens to cities where that work once took place? Will those who worked in offices ever return? And if we won’t, what will happen to our city centres? Will they become places of leisure more than industry? A place we go to change buses, try on clothes and go to the theatre, rather than hang out with colleagues in the nine to five? And if that happens, what will happen to the buildings? What will happen to the coffee houses that service them? If council meetings no longer need a council chamber, will there still be protests in Victoria Square?

As I reflect upon this, my picture of a city starts to change. Once if you named a place like, “Birmingham” or “Manchester” I would picture the centre with suburbs around it. Now, when I imagine Birmingham, I begin to think of a series or neighborhoods, linked like a web rather than connecting to a place with middle. And where once I used to think of goods and services as “made in Birmingham”, now I picture their origin in homes – homes that could be anywhere. With some sadness, I see my city as its residential streets rather than the industry that was once at its core.

Place and belonging

And so, as I sit in my place at the bottom of the garden, watching the spring equinox slowly turning into the summer solstice, I notice that my inner world is turning as the places turn around me.

Places are guardians of our memories. They are our photograph albums, the soundtracks of our lives. When our places change, our connection changes with them. Being displaced has changed my imagination around my home, my church and my Birmingham and so my sense of belonging is changing too.

Some of those changes are sweet, like the fur lining of a winter coat. Others are quite disturbing. Comfortable or not, there is nothing to be done, except resist the temptation to hold onto the old ways of belonging or grasp prematurely for new ones. The old places and my attachments to them must fall away. The new belongings will come. They will come. They will surely come. I learnt this from the trees.

Tune-up your business at Google’s Digital Garage

Jo Ind — Wed, 19 Aug 2015 07:00:56 +0000

I am delighted to be team lead at Google’s Digital Garage in the Library of Birmingham, which offers free digital tune-ups to small businesses.

Small businesses, start-ups and charities can book in for one-to-one mentoring sessions with Digital Garage technicians who will help improve their website, their social media presence, the way they use Adwords and much, much more.

The two training seminars are:

Tell your story online – creating a good website, making it mobile-friendly, using insights gained from data to improve your site and using social media to boost your digital presence
Reach new customers online – understanding how search works, being more findable in both regular (organic) and paid search

It’s all free, but it won’t be there for ever. The Garage will pop up for a few months in the Library of Birmingham and then pop up in another city, so get your Google goodies while you can.

Fancy a one-to-one with Google?

Jo Ind — Fri, 24 Jul 2015 15:34:41 +0000

Yay! Two of my favourite things came together today – Google and the Library of Birmingham.

Google launched its Digital Garage in our beautiful library today. It’s aim is to help small businesses in Birmingham grow through their use of the web.

So if you fancy a one-to-one session with a Google “technician”, you can step into a pod and have a chat about your digital issue .

And you can go to a seminar to hear advice from a Google guru on telling your story digitally or reaching more customers online.

And it’s all free.

What’s not to like? At the launch there were jellybeans and lollipops too.

Book a one-to-one session
Book a place on a training seminar

Children are the best clients

Jo Ind — Tue, 14 Apr 2015 11:15:50 +0000

Looking back over my work in the past five years, there are two projects that stand out as the most enjoyable. The jobs that have made me happiest have been designing the content for:

Evelina London Children’s Healthcare (through my contract with Digital Life Sciences)
Birmingham Children’s Hospital (through my contract with Maverick Television)

Both jobs involved doing workshops and interviews with children, play therapists, psychologists, doctors, nurses, allied health professionals and support staff and then using that information to create the style and voice of the website’s content.

I have gone through similar processes to make digital content for adults – West Midlands Academic Health Science Network, HEWM Learning, Modality Partnership, NHS local – but, though I have enjoyed it, it has not made my heart sing in quite the same way.

When I make content for children, I have a child continually in my mind. Going to work, turning on my computer, travelling, meeting, grafting…I am holding the needs of children in my heart.

For some reason, this makes me happy. Children are the best clients.

Work-life integration – the new work-life balance (darling)

Jo Ind — Mon, 10 Nov 2014 19:59:42 +0000

The good news for those who’ve struggled to strike a work-life balance is that you’re let off. Work-life balance is so turn-of-the-millennium (darling). Work-life integration is the must-have of the teeny decade.

It was six years ago the Chartered Management Institute produced a report Management Futures – The World in 2018 which claimed that rather than balancing work and home demands, by 2018 we will be weaving the two together.

More recently Mashable has been asking if work-life integration is the new norm and Harvard Business Review has considered what successful work-life integration looks like.

Work-life integration

To me work-life integration looks like doing my supermarket shopping in five minutes while waiting for a meeting at work to begin. It’s picking up an email from the office while standing in the school playground. It’s saying to a colleague: “Let me share this document with you so you can work on it tomorrow at home.”

It means the boundaries between my paid work and the rest of my life are less rigid than they were before Google was a map, a calendar, a filing system, a note book and an address book as well as a store, a video channel and a search engine.

Where I once restricted work to work, I can now nip into work while watching telly, lounging by a hotel pool or crawling through a tunnel in a soft play centre.

Do I want my work and life to be integrated?

I CAN do these things. But is it a good thing to do? Do I want to? For me the answer is about the extent to which the integration is within my control.

For the most part Google and its suite of tools have greatly enhanced my life. Being able to glance at work emails when I’m not in the office makes working part-time considerably easier. I don’t have to respond to emails if I don’t want to, but I can pick up on important things, if do.

And because I am only ever a click away, I can leave the office to see my son star as Joseph in his school nativity play or care for him when he is ill. It’s a win-win situation. Everyone gains.

Google calendar makes it possible

Apart from the capability of picking up emails anywhere, the tool I find most useful in leading an integrated life is Google calendar.

I remember the days, not so long ago, when, if I was trying to organise a get-together with a friend, she had to go home to look at her calendar before we could arrange anything. She and her husband kept a calendar in their kitchen, so they could see what the other was doing. This was fine – unless she was at work, in the pub or anywhere else when she needed to make an arrangement. How she needed Google calendar!

I now have a Google calendar for home and one for work. I have one for my husband and one for my son and I can access the calendars of whoever gives me permission in the office.

This functionality is invaluable to anyone who aspires to lead an integrated life. If I need to arrange a doctor’s appointment, I can click into my work calendar, my home calendar and my son’s to find a space when all are free. And I can do this wherever I am – from my phone, from the office or from my desk top computer at home.

I can turn the calendars off

But the real beauty of Google calendar is that I can turn the calendars off. I don’t share my home calendar with anyone outside the family. And when I’m at home or on holiday, I can tag a box which means my work calendar is not longer in my view.

Sometimes I need to see my personal and professional arrangements together. Sometime I want to separate the two. The beauty of Google calendar is that I can integrate or not, depending on what my needs are at the time.

Google calendar is not just a tool for work-life integration. It’s a metaphor for it too.

Work-life balance? That’s the least of it.

Jo Ind — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 12:19:20 +0000

I get heartily sick of the challenge of raising a family being characterised in terms of work-life balance.

Who thought of that phrase?

It makes it sound as though the only things we need are to earn a living and spend time with our families. The implication is that so long as we’ve risen to the challenge of getting work and childcare covered, we’re sorted.

Well, I’ve got news – we’re not.

I need solitude

I have another need and that need is for solitude. I’ll say it again, but louder: “SOLITUDE.”

I need time to be alone/pray/write. (I use forward slashes rather than commas because I’m not sure if they are different things.)

It is that need for solitude that too often goes unrecognised and therefore gets squeezed and therefore needs naming in capital letters.

Earlier this year I agreed to give a talk on revelation, identity and social media at the Greenbelt Festival. I rashly took this on in January when I had just taken redundancy and therefore anticipated I might be twiddling my thumbs around the August Bank Holiday (ho, ho).

What difference three days makes

As a result I have had to clear the time (three whole days so far) to be by myself and do a bit of reading and thinking and praying and writing – whatever name you give to what I do in my study.

Do you know? It has made me feel so good…. I was able to pay attention to random thoughts that had surfaced and been left hanging around like odd socks for far too many years. I felt peaceful, deeper, ‘gathered-in.’

I must do this more often. I WILL do it more often. Prayer/writing/solitude might not get named in “having it all” features in glossy magazines but I’m naming it and I’m doing it now.

New business card

Jo Ind — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 13:10:43 +0000

At last, I can reveal I have a new business card….

It’s not wonky in real life – that’s down to the photographer’s skill and creativity.

Since February I’ve been working for Maverick Television, the company that brought us Embarassing Bodies and How to Look Good Naked, to make a ground-breaking website for the NHS in the West Midlands.

We’ve still got a little way to go to be where we want to be but the password of NHS local was lifted yesterday.

I hate public relations (PR)

Jo Ind — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:34:28 +0000

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate the public relations industry and I certainly don’t hate people who work in it. Some of my best friends…..(Jayne Howarth, Ros Dodd etc). Unlike some journalists I actually feel grateful to good PR firms. Let’s be honest, in recent years working on a newspaper would have been far harder without them.

What I hate is doing PR. That’s all.

I feel the need to say this because since I’ve been a self-employed writer, at least once a week I get a call from somone I’ve featured in the Birmingham Post in the past, who wants me to write about them again. They suppose that now I’m freelance I’m only to happy to tout my work round a range of publications and, they imagine, earn a multiple fee from them.

To which I can only say that I would sooner pickle my head. In fact I DID say exactly that to one hopeful – he still didn’t understand I didn’t want the job.

For those that don’t understand the difference let me explain. It’s about the difference between telling and selling. I love the telling. I’m a writer. I like to communicate, to connect, to build up relationships. I loathe the selling – picking up a phone and saying: ‘I’ve got a great story here. Do you want to publish it?’

That’s why I’m not in PR. It’s why I’m not in double-glazing.

Granted, there is middleground between telling and selling, a place where sales-patter and headline-writing sit. I’m comfortable on one side of that middleground, I’m not on the other.

Next time I’m approached by someone who wants me to both tell and sell their story, I shall put analogies about pickling heads to one side. I shall simply say: ‘The service you require is public relations. £1,500 would be the going commerical rate.’ Let’s see if that works.

I love my new boss

Jo Ind — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 12:05:28 +0000

I love my new boss. I like her ideals, her approach to life, her attitude to business. They echo my own.

I know she has my best interests at heart – as I do hers. It’s not uncommon, even in the best of organisations, to feel a degree of ambivalence towards your employers. You are prepared to work hard and put yourself out, but, quite rightly, there are limits as to how far you will go on their behalf.

I don’t feel like that towards my new boss. I would go to the ends of the earth for her and her family. She has my complete, unconditional support.

I love being self-employed. It rocks.